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Remember how back in 2016, there was a funny meme going around about how you could text to vote for Hillary? A man named Douglass Mackey was behind that, who has been found guilty of election interference by a jury in New York. The argument goes that this effectively deleted a bunch of votes that should have gone to Clinton. Okay, so how many?
...I'm not an expert on the 2020 allegations of election interference, but come on now, I'm pretty sure those allegations were more than just thousands of votes. And they were dismissed on account of not likely having affected the election. Regardless, the meme was clearly a joke; that 4,900 number seems absolutely paltry and criminally charging him is making a mountain out of an anthill.
More importantly, it's not hard to interpret this in the light of Trump's recent indictment for a matter that also transpired in 2016. Now, I can understand the argument that the reason they didn't try to charge him then was because he was the president, and it would be pretty hard to try to bring charges against the president while he's in office, therefore they waited until he was out. Or, they didn't know that he paid off the porn star until recently. But this? Douglass's tweet was very public and they could've easily charged him all the way back in 2016 if they wanted to. Why are they doing it now?
That actually is not the argument, since he was convicted of conspiracy.
The case is case no 21-CR-80 (NGG). Which means it was filed in 2021. Federal criminal prosecutions are prosecuted by the US Attorney for the district. US Attorneys are appointed by the President and are replaced when a new President takes office. Is it a surprise that the Trump-appointed US Attorney did not prosecute a crime intended to help Trump win the election?
The jury, which heard the actual evidence, apparently found to the contrary; specifically, it found that he intended to deprive people of the right to vote. Has it occurred to you that there might have been more evidence presented than just the memes? Such as group chat logs where participants "discussed how to make the text-by-vote images look convincing" and testimony from one of the co-conspirators?
Why does that matter? People are convicted of attempts to commit crime all the time, after all, when the actual harm done is zero. And a bank robbery that nets only $4900 is even more paltry; should we give the robber a pass? As the theme song to Baretta said, "don't do the crime if you can't do the time."
As I recall, there's a long history of people on both sides of the aisle posting jokes/trolls to try and trick the other side into trying to vote on the wrong place, day, method, etc. As far as I know, this is the first time anybody has ever been prosecuted for it. I percieve this to be blatantly partisan political prosecution, since it's obviously a joke, and many Democrat activists have done similar things, and as far as I know, there has been no attempt to charge any of them with such crimes.
Even if we bend over backwards to the point of breaking spines to be charitable and assume the people driving this prosecution are neutral parties only looking out for the good of the republic, they would have to know that this would be perceived as blatantly partisan in these times. If that was truly their motivation, they ought to charge a couple of Democrats for doing similar things at the same time to avoid any perception of political bias.
Well, there was apparently a good amount of evidence presented at trial that it wasn't meant as a joke.
Like what? That article actually makes me more convinced of my position:
So they jacked up some other internet troll with the same type of bullshit charges who probably couldn't afford good Federal Defense attorneys to protect himself and forced him to testify against others or face prison time, and conveniently gave him anonymity, which sounds like a Sixth Amendment violation to me.
Sounds like a good argument to me!
It doesn't say exactly what kind of testimony any of these "witnesses" offered, but I can't conceive of how it would be relevant to the case. What do Clinton staffers and text message marketers know about this person's motivation or the results of his campaign?
The only thing that could possibly be vaguely relevant to the case is:
Exactly what did they do to "make them look convincing"? The rest sounds like normal political activism that both sides routinely practice to me. I'd have a pretty high bar against finding anything like this prosecution legitimate, and I have yet to see anything that comes anywhere near that.
Some evidence was included in the complaint, and I excerpted particularly strong points here
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Why does that matter? It is a conspiracy count, which does not require that they were successful.
It actually isn't, because, as I just said, conspiracy does not require the successful completion of the intended crime.
More importantly, I didn't say that there was sufficient evidence that they were guilty, but rather that there was evidence that it wasn't meant as a joke. If, as you say, this is political activism, then doesn’t that imply that it wasn't a joke?
The "political activism" part was referring specifically to:
Which apparently, according to the article, went to prove that they "weren't really joking".
Yes, this was a conspiracy charge. IMO, the large distance between what was actually done and any vaguely plausible claim of actually influencing an election makes this a blatantly partisan hit job. And IMO, the fact that they must have known it would look like this and made no attempt to make themselves and their campaign look more neutral says that they did it on purpose, that the goal was a chilling effect on Conservative activism.
If I start a chat with my 3 best friends where we talk about how funny it would be to trick Democrats into voting wrong, but never actually do anything, is that a crime in your opinion? What if we were all Democrats and we thought it would be funny to trick Republicans into voting wrong?
What happens when the next Republican President is as enthusiastic and skilled at lawfare as the Biden administration seems to be and start making these kinds of charges against Democrats?
I'll believe it when I see it. Modern political life in the U.S. is characterized by the institutional right largely being unwilling to play serious hardball, or even tit-for-tat with leftist political innovation.
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The courts, law firms and legal schools prevent it. Or the national security apparatus steps in.
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If the Biden administration or the deep state are good enough at this sort of thing, there won't be a next Republican president, or at worst, the next Republican president won't have this sort of control, so it won't matter.
If that ever becomes the case, the Constitution would have been entirely subverted, the Government would be no longer legitimate, and I would support the armed overthrow of the government and all institutions participating in or complicit with the maintenance of that power.
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You think a bank robber stealing money is a crime "more paltry" than posting text-to-vote election memes? This is disqualifying for your moral judgment.
Right, when the government arrests you for sedition, they're not violating your 1A rights, because they technically charged you with sedition, not speech.
Yes, it is paltry in the exact sense that OP used the term paltry: In the context of the extent of harm caused. There were something like 140 million votes cast for President in 2016. In contrast, total cash deposits in the banking system totals hundreds of billions of dollars, if not more. But if you want to compare harms, consider this: If my vote is annulled in some manner, that is a harm that can never be remedied, even if the perpetrator is caught. That is not the case re theft of my bank deposit.
Edit: But to be clear, the point is that if the paltriness is not a reason to refrain from prosecuting a bank robber, why should it be a reason to refrain from prosecuting this guy?
What does this have to do with the issue? OP made a claim about the legal basis for the conviction, and I simply pointed out that the amount of harm caused was not an element of the crime, and hence is irrelevant to the legal basis of the conviction. Whether the actions in question were protected by the First Amendment is a completely different issue, but is similar in this respect: The amount of harm caused is also irrelevant to whether his actions constituted protected speech.
"The legal basis" and "the crime" are completely made-up. These theories didn't exist before. If the government passes a law declaring pro-China sentiment equivalent to treason, I'm not going to take at face-value theories about this isn't chilling because "the First Amendment is a completely different issue". This is a recipe for negating the First Amendment: your speech isn't protected, because it {caused harm}.
Ricky's memes did not annul any votes and could not have annulled any votes.
No, they are neither new or made up. Laws re interfering with voting have been on the books forever. This guy just happens to have come up with a new way to violate the law.
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Who is going to support a law and order regime that is only applied selectively based on politics?
Those with the upper hand, of course.
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An obvious but unmentioned reason for 4900 people to text the number is that they wanted to see if doing so would provide a continuation of the joke. Texting the message didn't provide an automated response, but it easily could have, and trying it out lets you see if it does. The same way that, for example, when Grand Theft Auto marketers spread around phone numbers of in-game business/characters, the vast majority of the people calling those numbers did so because they wanted to hear a funny answering-machine message, not because they thought they were real.
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Well, the banana republic stuff seems to be picking up. It used to be the case that at least you can't be prosecuted by the state for speech in the US. That wall has fallen too now.
Is this really banana republic stuff? Libel, slander and fraud were all already legal limits on free speech.
I do agree with OP that 4900 possibly lost Democrat votes in NY is pretty unlikely to have had any real impact on the election, and that there should be a lot of room to exercise leniency for judges. But sending a strong message that election interference won't be tolerated seems like a reasonable enough thing for a democratic country that wants to maintain legitimacy.
Do you consider punishing any form of providing fake election information to be going to far? I'm not sure the "it was just a joke" defense really gets off the ground here.
This is an absolutist statement that tries to paint it as binary option - either nothing at all related to the elections is prosecuted, or anything can be prosecuted if only it could be attached to the election somehow. Of course, neither is the case. Some things - like destroying equipment, physically preventing voters from coming in, intimidating voters, etc. - can be prosecuted (though often aren't, see Black Panters ). Others - like publishing jokes and memes - shouldn't. When there is prosecution, the actual occurrence of the crime - i.e. specific people prevented from voting in a manner that violates their rights (i.e., for example, not convinced to not vote) should be proven beyond reasonable doubt.
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I don't see any reason to take this claim by the prosecution at face value. All they know is that 4900 numbers texted that number. How many actual individuals does that represent? How many of them are registered voters somewhere in the United States? It's trivially easy for anyone anywhere to get basically unlimited phone numbers in any area code. Did any of them refrain from voting conventionally because they actually believed that this was a way to vote? Were any of those people actually aware of the correct way to vote? Have any of them successfully voted in any election in the past? As far as I know, the prosecution did not make any attempt to prove that even one actual person who was registered to vote and plausibly would have voted correctly genuinely believed that this was a correct way to vote and did it instead of voting correctly.
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This isn't 4900 lost votes in NY, this is 4900 people who texted the number, total. The case has nothing to do with NY. They charged Ricky there because electronic cables under NY might have carried the tweets he sent.
That isn't what this is. They aren't charging FBI officials who lied about Russian interference with Hunter Biden's laptop. They aren't even charging other posters who made text-to-vote memes. This is selected and targeted. They used a statute that has never been enforced before to invent a new crime to charge someone for posting memes online. Illegitimate.
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Some previous discussion here more contemporaneous to the original indictment.
The court's first amendment analysis at the motion to dismiss phase is here, but not very compelling. The denial of motion to dismiss summarizes it in courtlistener as :
There's a few specific comparisons, but they're pretty limited to largely slapping the fraud exception onto things.
And the DoJ's comparable case from an earlier motion is almost universally non-speech matters:
or involve professional speech that's been long-excluded in very specific contexts:
It'd be funny if this was the case that got SCOTUS to categorically disfavor any untrue speech, given the various changes to the bench, but it's more likely Mackey just has it disappear in a bunch of inventive decisions by state courts of appeal. As back in 2021, I can't see any way to merge this with existing jurisprudence -- 18 USC 241 is just far too ludicrously vague and broad, even if a law specifically about election-specific lies might be acceptable -- but I dunno how much that matters if no one's going to make this a cause celebre.
In Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, 138 S. Ct. 1876 (2018), the Supreme Court said: "We do not doubt that the State may prohibit messages intended to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures." So the free speech argument does not seem to be very compelling.
Why are you mentioning that "the DoJ's comparable case from an earlier motion is almost universally non-speech matters?" The portions you quote are in response to a completely different argument: "The defendant’s due process argument is largely rooted in his assertion that he simply could not have understood that his alleged conduct was illegal." There is an entire section of that DOJ filing that discusses the First Amendment argument -- it actually discusses Mansky -- which goes on for seven pages.
I'm familiar with Mansky, and I referenced it at length in the previous 2021 discussion I linked above (indeed, started by referencing!). And I agree and agreed that a specific law against election-related false statements would (and should) probably survive SCOTUS scrutiny.
Because the First Amendment right to free speech is one of those few places SCOTUS has taken things seriously, and that section did not. It is not enough for First Amendment analysis to say that any imaginable law could prohibit conduct, thus this application of the law here is permissible: the First Amendment is one of the few areas where rather than the clear division of facial- and as-applied challenges, we have the glory that is the "chilling effects" doctrine. This nexus of due process and First Amendment concerns has driven a pretty wide variety of constitutional law, and they're pretty relevant here.
A good half of that is defining the behavior here as fully non-speech conduct and compares to other obviously-and-well-established non-speech conduct (pgs 15-19), and of the few pages (19-22) even discussing it in the context of speech, the comparable cases are if anything worse than the due process section:
Anderson v. Celebrezze, where the court held "Ohio's early filing deadline places an unconstitutional burden on the voting and associational rights", quotes from part of the decision which is describing how the state has "has the undoubted right to require candidates to make a preliminary showing of substantial support" and "to prevent distortion of the electoral process by the device of "party raiding," the organized switching of blocs of voters from one party to another in order to manipulate the outcome of the other party's primary election".
Burson v. Freeman, where "There is a substantial and long-lived consensus among the 50 States that some restricted zone around polling places is necessary to serve the interest in protecting the right to vote freely and effectively..." "...provided that the response is reasonable and does not significantly impinge on constitutionally protected rights."
John Doe No. 1 v. Reed, where it was constitutionally permissible for a state law to require petition signatories to be disclosed.
Mansky, which as I'm sure you know was about people wearing political hats and t-shirts (and buttons?) at the polls themselves.
NCBCP v. Wohl, which was about robocall 'jamming' of a political centre.
That is, these all reflect clearly non-speech conduct, or closely-held locations, or sometimes both. The closest in comparison is Wohl, but cell phone direct messaging has long been given lower protection. More importantly, it used an entirely different statute(s) specific to the behavior at hand: Wohl was charged under 52 U.S.C. § 10307(b) ("intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for voting or attempting to vote") and 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) ("conspire to prevent by force, intimidation, or threat, any citizen who is lawfully entitled to vote"). These statutes are both specific to the conduct (intimidation), the matter being defended (voting rights), and focused on an area with long-established exception (or at least as non-mushy as SCOTUS' "true threats" doctrine is.)
I guess I don't get why a specific law would and should survive scrutiny, whereas the application of the general law outlawing conspiracy to deprive someone of rights to the same conduct would not. As you know, the Court has often held that the application of a general law to the actions of a defendant violate that defendant's free speech rights, but I don't recall a single time that the Court said that a specific law that did exactly the same thing would somehow not be a violation of his free speech rights. That doesn't mean that they don't exist, but I would be interested to see one.
That does not seem to be true:
Anderson is not cited for its holding or facts, but merely for "compiling cases that upheld restrictions on speech to protect electoral integrity."
Burson is cited merely for the principle that even pure, political speech on the merits of candidates and ballot issues can be restricted in order to preserve election integrity. And the statute there "prohibits the solicitation of votes and the display or distribution of campaign materials within 100 feet of the entrance to a polling place. That is not "non-speech conduct."
John Doe is cited for the same thing, and related to a law permitting the public release of referendum petitions. Signing a petition to but a referendum on the ballot is not "non-speech conduct."
Wohl is cited merely for the claim that " lower courts have not been blind to the grave risks offered by conduct like that of the defendant" but, as you noted, it is about robocalls falsely telling voters that if they vote by mail, "your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts." That sounds like pretty much pure speech to me.
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No one has ever been prosecuted before for posting text-to-vote memes. How could he have known it was illegal? They have enough laws and subclauses and fine print to make us all guilty of something.
This is just special pleading. Just because he came up with a new way to violate an established law does not mean that he could not have known it is illegal.
If qualified immunity protects government officials who knowingly break the law, but who do so in a way that hasn’t yet been ruled to clearly violate their victims’ constitutional rights (e.g., police who steal $225,000 while on the job), wouldn’t you agree that a sane legal system should likewise protect non-government officials in a similar way?
Leaving aside the fact that, by definition, qualified immunity does not protect against violations of established law ("We need not determine whether the complaint plausibly alleges the violation of a constitutional right, because Mr. Montgomery fails to show that the officers' actions violated clearly established law." Montgomery v. Gerdjikian (no. 22-1126, 10th Circuit 2023)), and that QI only applies to civil suits alleging violations of constitutional rights, which with very few exceptions can't be be violated by non-governmental actors, this is a criminal case. Qualified immunity does not protect officials from criminal prosecution.
As an aside, I am no fan of current QI jurisprudence, but there are perfectly legitimate reasons for providing QI re suits under Section 1983, which allows a successful plaintiff to recover his attorney's fees from the defendant. Make it too easy to sue under Section 1983, and no govt official will ever even think to look cross-eyed at anyone with money. And, btw, "qualified immunity, as a federal doctrine, does not protect government officials from liability under state law." Mack v. Williams, 138 Nev. Adv. Op. 86 (Nev: Supreme Court 2022), citing many cases.
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Was the Supreme Court's next word "But"?
Well, you could look the case up to find out. But, yes, it was dictum, which is obvious from the construction of the sentence (and also obvious from the fact that I said that the Court "said" that, rather than "held" that, and from the fact that I said that the First Amendment claim "does not seem to be very compelling" rather than "is incorrect under current jurisprudence."). It was dictum because the law in question did not purport to do that, but rather purported to limit lies about the candidates: "But that interest does not align with the State's construction of "political" to refer to messages "about the electoral choices at issue in [the] polling place." And, as I noted, the AG cited Mansky extensively, and in fact the District Court relied on Mansky in denying Mackey's motion to dismiss on First Amendment grounds.
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Wasn't the whole thing in the Larry Flint defamation case that the speech he was accused of was blatantly untrue to the point of being ridiculous?
In any case, this seems to be building grounds for prosecuting people for "misinformation" - which, as we know, is anything the government doesn't want to be said. If the government can prosecute any speech it declares false, and the only barrier is finding a jury with correct political inclinations, then the 1st amendment provides no protection about government prosecution anymore.
The government could not find a single witness to testify this at trial. Nobody was harmed.
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Something else I just thought about. We know about dozens of people who knowingly distributed false information connected to elections - namely, the lie that Biden's laptop has been a foreign intelligence fake. We know that it significantly influenced the elections. We know there wasn't not only a single conviction but even a single attempt to open investigation into the matter. I think this should bury the idea that anybody is interested in prosecuting "election interference" that is committed by lying. Not that I would call for it - on the contrary, such a prosecution would be as big a spit in the face of the First Amendment as this one is, but it doesn't happen. Which clearly establishes the zeal for truth, even misguided, is not why this prosecution happened. What was the real motive I leave as the exercise for the reader.
No, that would be more of something like - statements of fact / material statements relating to a political candidate or issue, which would receive broad First Amendment protection, as restricting that gives the govt/courts a way to directly censor some political positions. That's clearly different than issues solely related to election procedure like 'where and how to vote'.
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Sure. If you blow up a polling station, or ruin the road leading to one, or sabotage people's cars so they can't come to the election - or all your voting machines have mysterious malfunction all over the district and voters can't vote for many hours - there could be grounds for prosecution. At least if Democrats don't win there could be. But just putting a meme (clearly a ridiculous one) out there on the internet doesn't do any of that.
That needs to be proven, and it wasn't.
Nobody interfered with that right. The assumption that some idiot didn't vote - which is not proven even in a single case! - is not interfering with the right, they very well could vote if they wanted to. If I convince you not to go to vote, because it's useless and the system is rigged - would I be convicted for "interfering with the rights"? After all, as we all know, "the system is rigged" is a lie, or at least the government knows that, which is enough - and here you go. Then if I try to convince people that they shouldn't vote for a certain candidate who is running unopposed, because he's a piece of shit - that also would be interfering with elections. Then there's almost no space left between that and jailing me for advocating any electoral position - after all, if I convince you to vote certain way, I also convinced you not to vote some other way, and we already agreed convincing you not to vote is a crime.
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Spiritually worse, because they miss out on the precious "I voted" sticker? Or quantitatively half as bad, because the margin of victory changes by 2 for everyone tricked about a candidate but only by 1 for everyone tricked about a polling rule?
I'm all for limiting fraud claims to polling rule deceptions, both because that gives a bright line to limit abusive prosecution and because there's way less room in those cases for plausible deniability by the deceitful, but that doesn't mean the deceitful in other cases should be proud of figuring out how to promote a falsehood with twice the effectivity and none of the criminal liability.
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It'd likely be several crimes - using official insignia without permission, probably some kind of trademark violation, likely mail fraud, etc. The content of the envelope wouldn't really add much. None of this happened in this case. This is like somebody being prosecuted for peacefully protesting against a politician and you'd say "there should be a line somewhere - if he murdered him, dismembered the body, liquified it in acid, and set his house on fire - that should be a crime, right?" Yes, it should be. Nothing like that happened though.
No there isn't. There's evidence they contacted the number. That's not proving any crime, and definitely not the one that was insinuated. It used to be that the crimes have to be proved. Not "well, he did something that we could imply that might be connected to something else", but the actual deed that is criminal.There was no proof for that. Even if there was, it'd be very questionable it is a crime - at least there should be a proof of criminal intent, if I just tell you "you know they cancelled elections?" and you believe it, it's not a crime. But they didn't do even the minimal thing. Because they didn't need to - finding a friendly jury which will convict anybody who is politically opposed to them is, apparently, much easier.
You saying "would have" as if it were established they didn't. There's no single case where it was proven any of those people din't vote the normal way. You just assumed that - because it couldn't be The Powers screwed up that badly, could it? Yes, it could.
No, there wasn't, and they didn't even try that hard to do it. Probably because they counted on people assuming what they had is enough - and indeed, as we see, it was. Don't complain when you get a friendly local policeman show up at your door for a joke on twitter - after all, somebody could take it seriously - you see, 3 people liked it! - and that could mislead him into voting for a wrong person (not Democrat), and that's election interference. Hope you like them bananas.
That'd require using the actual official insignia, and as far as I know, it didn't happen.
No, but I have reporting that clearly indicates there was no proof of any case of not voting as a result of that and the prosecution relied on messages to the number alone. Of course, as we all know, reporting can be false - and if you provide reliable reporting to the contrary, I will re-evaluate my opinion. So far it didn't happen.
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There is a brief discussion of some of the evidence that was presented here, but the source is one-sided so it does not include any contrary evidence.
It appears that the defendant testified, so it is always possible that the jury thought he was lying.
I'm curious what ground you see for an appeal.
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Thanks, I removed the bits about New York.
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4900 is not in any way a paltry number. One state had a gap of 2700 votes between winner and loser. People are convicted all the time for voter fraud (which, of course, is a different thing than what mackey did) involving a few votes. Of course, 4900 unique numbers might not mean 4900 people whose votes were prevented, who knows.
Just combine your trump explanation with 'collecting evidence, preparing a case, bureaucracy, and procedures takes a while'? I don't know, but that is a lot simpler than 'it's coordinated with trump's indictment'. It's not even aimed at trump.
To the merits of the conviction - where should the line between 'joke' and 'interfering with an election' be? It's arguable that, if you make a concerted effort to mislead voters and do mislead a large number of voters, even if it's a "joke" you still committed the crime. Similarly, if you 'falsely advertise' a product as a joke, that should be first-amendment protected - but if people tricked by the 'joke' try to buy the fake product, and you accept their payments without delivering, that should be illegal. I'd guess that (not-lawyer-squishy-opinion), on the balance, this should be legal, but it's more reasonable to criminalize it than most other kinds of satirical speech, as the govt has an interest in elections being run fairly. It isn't really outrageous, signaling a crackdown on right-wing dissidents, or anything like that.
Eugene Volokh wrote a detailed article about the case, before Mackey was found guilty. My read is - there are arguments both ways on whether restricting that speech is, or should be, permitted by the First Amendment, but the particular statute used isn't a good fit.
It used to be, in non-banana-republic countries, the prosecution had to prove such things. As far as I know, they didn't prove a single case of anyone being prevented from voting. Of course, now "it could happen, who knows" is proof enough to convict a person.
He was convicted of conspiracy, which does not require a completed crime, so they did not have to prove that anyone had their votes prevented.
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That’s why there are a couple of levels of courts above that, and then the Supreme Court.
You forgot about "the process is the punishment" part. How much do you think preparing a case for Supreme Court costs? In case the Court wants to bother with it, which is not even guaranteed - so you could spend all this money to prepare the petition and then don't even get a hearing. Would the perspective of undergoing multi-year and ruinously expensive process deter you from criticizing certain politicians (remember, comrade: nobody ever gets prosecuted for memes about Trump!) or wouldn't it?
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Nowhere near this? It is a joke because of how incredibly stupid it is. Even if somehow, by a magic of fate 50% of potential Hillary voters fell for it, and she lost a 537-1 (DC) landslide it would still have been a joke. This does not interfere with the voting process in any way. If it does affect someone's vote, it is still a meta joke about that person's intelligence and fitness to vote.
DC has three electoral votes; in your hypothetical, it would be 535-3.
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Agree. 4900 is more than i would have guessed for a seemingly harmless twitter joke...that is more than enough to move the needle for swing states. Had someone did this but targeting trump voters and had trump lost, we'd be hearing to no end by the same guys on Twitter about how it's not a joke and how it's evidence of fraud, and so on. One way around this is to charge him to set legal precedent , but sentence him lightly. To add, I personally don't think he should have been charged and someone who fall for such a joke is too ill-informed to have a say, but I can see the rationale for charging him. The 1st amendment protects a lot, but I can see a line being drawn if it involves elections. Let's assume someone like Nayib Bukele had charged some people for making a similar joke that interfered with his election. Would the same people supporting him now be defending those people for making a joke on the grounds of the 1st amendment? The failure of people to apply their principles evenly/consistently is one of the problems I have with online-right.
The justification is made-up. They aren't charging anyone else who posted text-to-vote memes. Next time, they'll invent new legal theories and government powers to arbitrarily charge someone else they don't like.
"I made up some arguments in my head, and I don't like the answers I imagine you gave me. This is what I don't like about you."
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There is also "no evidence" (using election fraud standards) that any of those people didn't vote because of texting that number. Even if they actually went around asking people for this criminal complaint, which is conveniently not allowed in most election fraud lawsuits, that would still only be mild evidence, because probably most of the people who say yes wouldn't have voted in reality. The dimpled chads had a better argument. Kari Lake has a better argument. This argument is below laugh worthy.
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That's BS - I have seen dozens of such jokes, from both sides, close to every election previously. And nobody ever on the Trump side complained about it as an evidence of fraud. While we are seeing here that the Biden side is not just complaining - but prosecuting a person for it. But still somehow it's Trump's fault, amazingly.
This wasn't just a single casual joke!
Excerpts from the complaint, which somehow blocks copying
This does seem to show intent to actually influence voting, as opposed to just laughing. That said, 'actually influencing the vote' is pretty funny. And the sort of person who'd fall for such a dumb trick probably isn't someone whose political opinions, and thus vote, are of particular value anyway.
article with example images and some context
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